William James Knight / Andrews Raiders

William J. Knight, born in Wayne County, Ohio, in 1837 and raised near Farmer, Ohio, by his grandparents Jacob and Martha Knight, enlisted in Company E of the 21st Ohio Volunteer Infantry after the outbreak of the Civil War. On April 12, 1862, at age twenty-five, he took part as an engineer in Andrews Raid, led by James J. Andrews, in which the raiders stole the locomotive General at Big Shanty, Georgia, intending to cut telegraph lines and destroy railroad bridges and tracks while heading north between Atlanta and Chattanooga. The raiders were captured above Ringgold, Georgia, and eight were executed. Knight and seven others escaped from an Atlanta jail on October 16, 1862, and reached Federal lines, while six raiders were exchanged in 1863. Knight and eighteen other raiders received the Medal of Honor for their roles. He was discharged from the army on September 27, 1864, when his term of service expired, and by 1886 had settled in Stryker, where he gave lectures about the raid. The Andrews Raiders were James J. Andrews, William H. Campbell, Samuel Robertson, Marion A. Ross, John M. Scott, Charles P. Shadrach, Samuel Slavens, George D. Wilson, Wilson W. Brown, Daniel A. Dorsey, Martin J. Hawkins, William J. Knight, John R. Porter, John Alfred Wilson, John Wollam, Mark Wood, William Bensinger, Robert Buffum, Elihu H. Mason, Jacob Parrott, William Pittenger, William H. Reddick, Samuel Llewellyn, and Ovid Wellford Smith; Smith and Llewellyn volunteered like the others but missed the raid.

Stryker, Ohio · United States